Community Food System: Old Thoughts

These are entries that I have previously written in response to a class I'm taking at UMASS in the Plant, Soil, and Insect Science department titled Community Food Systems. We have been reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and recording our thoughts on the readings and the content of the course.

9/7

The information within the CFS Primer acted as an organizing tool to a scattered knowledge that I have been learning and discovering, creating a coherent method to deliver an idea that seems to have been forgotten for so long. It feels unfair that a large part of our human nation has managed to collectively and voluntarily undergo an amnesic state about something that was once so integral to our species. The act of consuming energy in the form of food is the essential trait of our animal kingdom. Pastorals and Agriculturists alike. And so having been able to cultivate plants to our liking and sustain our growth over time by the means of agriculture has serious implications towards our relationship with the natural world. This is an implication that to be human is to inherently know the plants we consume. We distinguish the beneficial from the toxic, we utilize our distinctly human trait of manipulating fire to cook the food, through trial and error we have found which foods complement what and what properties they have in regard to our health; these are discoveries that are incredible and unforgettable to our species.
It feels strange, then, that myself and many other human beings have only recently rediscovered how sacred a relationship it is that we have with our food.
Our society makes it easy to grow up with the belief that food is an easy commodity, that it is found wherever there is a supermarket. Feeling disconnected with the food we eat is common; the food we eat is easily wasted as it is easily replaced by something more fitting to what we crave.
Outranked only by tobacco use, the leading ultimate cause of death amongst Americans as found from a 1990 and 2000 study is poor diet and physical activity [Mokdad et al, American Medical Association 2004). There is something seriously wrong with how we are eating.

I am in this class because of the threat of the popular eating habits of our nation on the public health of our nation. I am here to further educate myself about something that I should have always known, being human. It is vital to my well-being to remember the connection I have with the food that is grown to feed myself, my family, and my community as a whole. I want more people to wake up and remember that we are connected deeply to what we eat and that we can't allow ourselves to accept amnesia and to blindly consume food that originates in a lab rather than a field. I am taking this class to educate others about the importance of our community food system and why it is we need to know what we are eating. It is essential to me.

9/14

My mother is a preschool teacher, and part of the curriculum she teaches includes a week of learning about farms, farm animals, and the food grown at the farm. Picture books, games, and toys are the tools used to represent and educate. Visits to local farms are usually included. I remember when I was young and my mental image for agriculture looked more like Mr. McGregor's garden or Zuckerman's Farm. It seems disjointed then, that what is taught in schools and what children learn to be agriculture includes no connections whatsoever to the food that we purchase. Children don't learn about the enormous monoculture plots that provide the coveted junk food in the middle of the supermarket. That stuff has to be made with magic, and indeed there's plenty of commercials showing Elves using secret ingredients and spells to make sugary, fat loaded treats to reinforce this notion.
The fact that the vast majority has no opinion about The Farm Bill and the impact made by it suggests that the idea that food comes from a magic place that none of us can see or visit (Iowa) is shared by the masses.

I would imagine that children would be outraged to learn that there is no magic land that makes cookies and treats and snacks. Instead, there's just rows upon rows of the same plants: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice. And that these massive plots of the same plant encroach upon Mr. McGregor's garden and Zuckerman's farm and put them out of work. I would think a child would tell their parents no, if you buy that happy meal then the farmers they learned about in school won't be able to keep their farms. The only reason we don't see children doing this is because they aren't being taught about the relationship between their local farmers and the giant industrial monocultures.

The Farm Bill and the topics that Michael Pollan writes about in his article are shocking when they shouldn't be. Our nation is by and large ignorant about food and this needs to be changed. People need to recognize the decisions that are being made against public well-being as well as against environmental well-being. Beginning in early education, our national eye needs to open if it ever hopes to recover from a long coma of ignorance towards the decisions made by the select few that affect he majority.

With that, I'm looking forward to the opportunity in this class to present the concepts of community food systems to local schools.

9/21

Really, truly: not all carrots are created equal. Humans should know this by know. We, more so perhaps than any other species, celebrate the fact of a naturally occurring uniqueness. We’ve spent centuries congratulating ourselves for being able to produce the kind of individualistic qualities that we celebrate in our hallmark geniuses, engineers, scientists, and those who go out there and “discover” the world we forgot we belonged to for the rest of us.

We let ourselves become overwhelmed at this capacity for diversity. We were so obsessed with our own potential that we somehow distanced ourselves from the very ecological diversity that we co-evolved with, the logical chaos of the natural world. Without that biodiversity, we simply would not be.

This can be certain: there is a very good reason that a plant thrives best under certain conditions; a particular animal has an inherent motivation to eat a certain set of plants; and those who enjoy life at the top of the food chain have evolved side-by-side with the particularities of those animals, plants, and microbes.

Examine the different regions of the world and you’ll find a deep relationship between the cultures of the native peoples there and the foods that they have evolved side by side with. The various peoples of India did not up and decide that they as a people really enjoyed the spice mix that resulted in curry and masala and that they would thus cultivate this from now on; Indian cuisine is a result of the relationship between the plants that occurred in that particular geographic region and climate and the people who established themselves there.

Is there not something strange then about someone living in New England eating grapefruit in September? The grapefruit in question was purchased by one of my housemates. We had made a mission as a household to minimize the damage we wrought on the world. Our produce came from the share we bought at the Hampshire College farm. We were going to work hard to be “sustainable”; we talked about it and decided on setting up a communal food system. We would buy from the farmer’s market, get our milk and eggs from the farmer’s hands, order our bulk grains and oil through the Hampshire student-run food co-op Mixed Nuts… I really thought that we were going to take a collective step in the right direction. Our communal food purchases we agreed to split the costs between all six of us living together…

Then came the $87 receipt from Whole Foods. Grapefruits? Imported ginger? Almond butter? Not to mention the sudden appearance of non-communal packaged USDA certified organic mixed greens and asparagus and so on. But the amount of food we picked up from farmshare was more than enough to feed all of us…

I suppose it isn’t my place to begrudge those who wish to eat grapefruit in Amherst of this great fortune. It was bought at Whole Foods (surely a better choice than Stop & Shop) after all, and the fruit (originally cultivated in Barbados, a hybrid of the pomelo and the sweet orange) is certainly packed with antioxidants and all sorts of the stuff that we’re supposed to give our bodies. But according to whom, nutritionists in the unique position of having an entire planet-worth of menu options to choose from?

There was a reason the first grapefruit was grown in Barbados. And I’m almost positive that it had nothing to do with feeding the inhabitants of a temperate broadleaf and mixed mesophytic forest of the northeast United States.

I’ve never bought from Whole Foods before; I always considered it out of my budget, not to mention a big scam. Sure I play into the organic thing when I’m unable to get my veggies from local sources. “At least it’s better than conventional farming,” I say to myself when caught between a sore desire to eat something green and the lack of a local source.

I thought it was a little outrageous, those grapefruits. I’m used to eating apples in the fall, maybe peaches and pears too. “At least they’re organic.” Hmm. Well. Whatever that even means.

Reading about the Goodmans and Gene Khan raised an awareness of transience. They were like us. They wanted to live in harmony with nature, live in a self-sufficient and waste-free way. They existed outside of the mainstream, capitalist bullshit… for a moment. Then the world shook all the soul out of them and turned their ideals into industrial organic.

I feel privileged to be here in this time and in this place, in a community of like-minded individuals eager for change. But the grapefruits on the kitchen counter have me stumped. There are so many of us who see that there is something so wrong with the way our nation eats. We change our diets; we reject the ways our parents ate. The thing that gets me though is how half-assed we do this. We’re experiencing this buzz for change, but there are way too many who believe what the label says and settle for the story they want to believe.

Change, I believe, happens in waves, in little progressive increments. We’ve opened our eyes to the fact that the big-time industrial has damaged our health as well as our land. So we switch to shopping at Whole Foods and opting for the big organic. It’s so popular these days, it’s hard not to get caught up into it. But all the self-celebration has stopped us from fully opening our eyes.

I didn’t get how bad the industrial organic really was until Michael Pollan confronted me with it. It is now hard to avoid a strong aversion to eating anything that would be improbable to eat in this season, in this region. The real problem lies in getting my housemates as well as other members of my community to realize that the big organic isn’t good enough; it’s a step in the right direction but it is NOT ok to think that the problems created by agribusiness are just going to go away if we buy into the story fed to us on the package marked by the USDA organic seal.

9/28

Everything is connected; this is more than the law of ecology. This is the law of life, of history, of the future: it is all so detrimentally connected. If more chickens are introduced to the land, then a pollution problem will arise. When balance is lost, that is when there is a problem.

According to traditional Taoist belief and Chinese herbal medicine, the human spirit and health depends upon the balance of the yin and yang. This is described variously: too much fire in the liver; excess wind in the skin. These aren’t mystical concepts, as these terms might lead western thinkers to believe. Rather, these particular descriptions are a means to describe how things function in relation to each other and to the universe. This is the system of thinking that Joel Salatin promotes. There are many philosophies of Lao Tzu (considered the founder of Taoism) that describe this balance of yin and yang:

In order to contract,
It is necessary first to expand.
In order to weaken,
It is necessary first to strengthen.
In order to destroy,
It is necessary first to promote.
In order to grasp,
It is necessary first to give.

This principle is the method of recovering the gross global imbalance that Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan are prescribing to. In order for our species to heal the damage we have done to our spirits, bodies, health, and our environment, we need to restore balance. Salatin is attempting to regain balance through his efforts at Polyface Farm. He commits his farm and life to mimicking natural ecology by maintaining his farm in four dimensions, time as well as space. He practices the laws of the natural world, and by doing so is rewarded with the bounty of earth. His life is devoted to honoring this pact.

How would the rest of us go about to restoring balance? We are in a position that makes it approximately impossible for us all to live like Joel Salatin, not at our population growth rate, ecological degradation, and resource deprivation. It will take so much time for our people to cease the damage we inflict and globally implement healing. So many mental models would need to adjust. Many of us have begun changing our systems thinking to reflect the laws of ecology, but there are still so many people who are unable to change because of the pressure of socio-economic factors.

Social-Environmental justice is crucial to our education of community food systems and environmental restoration. Before we can hope to implement wide-scale revitalization of our planet and people, we need to first address the level of imbalance in our economy and society at large.